TF2 could easily have not been the free-to-play hat simulator we know and love.

All this week, we've been talking about daring games and their designers. Valve isn't a developer that is necessarily thought of as daring because, thanks to Steam, it's free to be patient and take risks because a failure won't put it out of business. Yet it was a daring decision to go in the direction that it did with Team Fortress 2's art style. It's a decision that was no guaranteed success, but five years later the game is still going strong, albeit in a much different form -- a form that was unwittingly made possible by that decision all those years ago.

Team Fortress 2 was originally announced in 1999. It was meant to be a proper sequel to the Quake mod that started it all in 1996 which would follow Team Fortress Classic, a version of the original mod built on the Half-Life engine. When it was first shown, it had a realistic art style and was to feature things like a commander mode that was ultimately ditched because it wasn't fun enough. This style wasn't a flash in the pan, either; in 2007, Robin Walker told Game Informer, "We had a fully playable version of TF2 that was the military version on Quake 2 that we play-tested before we came here."

After several delays, Valve became silent on the project for more than a half-decade, only occasionally reassuring fans that it still would come. In July 2006, we finally got a look at the game as we know it today. Gone were the visuals that wouldn't have looked terribly out of place in Counter-Strike, and in was a style that looked like an attempt to mimic an animated film from Pixar. (In fact, Valve says it was J. C. Leyendecker, Dean Cornwell, and Norman Rockwell who served as inspiration for the style.) This was the final version of "three to four different games" Walker said were built over that six-plus-year span, with the good stuff from each being cherry-picked to make for the best game possible.

It was the new art direction, which Valve hoped would differentiate TF2 from the glut of photorealistic games on the market, that made much of the game possible. While the same nine classes were carried over from previously released iterations of Team Fortress, having the game look like a cartoon allowed each class to become more distinct. In the same GI interview, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi noted, "The military theme also I think detracted it from the uniqueness of the different roles." Not only were the characters more unique under the new style, they were visually distinct -- you can easily tell what class a player in the distance is playing just by looking at their silhouette.

The visuals also gave Valve an excuse to employ the sort of verticality in the level design it was shooting for. "We kept doing these spaces which played really well and then when you looked at them they didn't have a real world analog that made any sense at all," Walker said. "Our stylization helped us a lot when we were building the spaces we wanted to build for combat."

There were other benefits of this as well: enabling the humor and personalities that would have felt out of place coming from more realistic-looking soldiers; making it feel less bizarre for a pair of hated enemies (the red team and the blue team) to have bases located extremely close to one another; giving the game a timeless feel so that it ages better than games which strive for photorealism and begin to look outdated more rapidly; and opening the door for something like the excellent Meet the Team videos to be produced, which in turn have allowed Valve to explore movie-making. The most substantial of all, however, might be the business model the game eventually adopted.

In the years since its release, Team Fortress 2 has received countless free updates, many of which brought with them new weapons and items for the various classes to use. (The game originally had a fixed set of equipment for each class.) An in-game store was added in 2010 that sold both weapons and cosmetic items to players for real-world money. These things could still be unlocked through regular gameplay, and since then an entire economy of trading and crafting has developed which provides multiple ways to get your characters outfitted the way you want. Still, the store has proven to be successful enough that the game went free-to-play last summer (a daring choice in and of itself, as the model hadn't been shown to work for shooters) without charging for access to classes, maps, or game modes.

The art direction allowed for a much wider variety of weapons and items than would have been otherwise possible -- can you imagine throwing a jar of urine at a teammate (to extinguish them if on fire) or an enemy (to cause them to take additional damage) in a realistic-looking shooter? It has also made crossover promotions with other games on Steam possible. And the number of possibilities for weapons and items the style of the game permits has provided intrepid modders with the opportunity to come up with their own creations which can then be submitted and sold in-game, with Valve and the creator each getting a cut of the proceeds.

Perhaps Valve could have still found a way to make free-to-play work for Team Fortress 2, but it may have had to take a different form that gamers find less acceptable. If the game looked like Call of Duty, it's unlikely players would care quite as much about customizing the look of their characters. When the silliness of the game allows for the choices to include a pair of glasses with a fake nose, a birdcage hat, a journalist fedora (my personal favorite), and the severed head of Max from Sam & Max, doing so becomes much more tempting.

Opting to use a cartoon-ish art style was a bold move for Valve; as noted above. It would not have been bankrupted by TF2's failure -- remember, the game was released as one component of The Orange Box in 2007 alongside Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Portal -- but it could have been shunned by fans turned off by the idea of playing a game that some could write off as being "kiddy." This sort of art direction had not been shown to be a recipe for success for shooters; XIII and Fur Fighters aside, it's hard to think of many that even tried. It is a style at odds with that of every shooter Valve has produced, but its success has been significant: it showed the company it could be successful with free-to-play without restricting playable content, a model that was not a one-off, as evidenced by it now being used for Dota 2. TF2, meanwhile, will keep on chugging along, evolving in all sorts of directions that could easily have never been possible if not that surprising change in art styles.

Comments (3)

it's always daring

to change a franchise's graphics style drastically especially after many years and one with a rabid fanbase. In fact i'd put wind waker up here right with TF2, i remember the internet exploded though with zelda, at least compared to TF2's relatively calm reception upon graphical reveal.

Borderlands

is another example. In the original previews the graphics for that game looked boring and monochromatic (i.e., brown). I was interested in the premise despite the perceived similarties to other games that made promises of a fun hybridization of shooting and Diablo-style loot chasing, but failed to follow though on their promise. I was unsure if I would buy it, but when Gearbox revealed the new art style I was sold. It gave Borderlands a very distinct style that set it apart and made desert an interesting setting for co-op shootering.

Actually among a lot of hardcore gamers

There was a concern about the kiddie look before its release. I used to play in a clan competitively on HL2:DM and there was kind of a split opinion of what game we where going to buy. On the one had the was the Frotress forever mod that was basically like the original Team fortress released a few weeks before team Fortress 2. A lot of gamers where saying that that was going to be better than TF2 because of the whole cartoony graphics thing. So I tried it out but still bought TF2 anyway and got in on the pre release beta. It only took about a month for everyone to realize that TF 2 was the way better game that defied expectations about its graphic style. Our clan switched over to playing TF 2 and Fortress Forever kind of died. In fact the style only reinforced the gameplay rather than detract from it. There would be no mistaking a Heavy for a soldier coming you way. You knew instantly the difference between the medic and a spy. I pretty much love everything about this game. And now they just released a comic previewing a new update for a third grey all robot team. I may have to start playing again.